The concept of rendering objects invisible has long been contemplated in science fiction. Works such as Star Trek and The Invisible Man include means to render objects or people invisible. The actual achievement of making objects disappear however has heretofore been limited to fooling the human eye with “magic” tricks and camouflage. The latter often involves coloring the surface of an object such as a military vehicle with colors and patterns which make it blend in with its surrounding.
The process of collecting pictorial information in the form of two dimensional pixels and replaying it on monitors has been brought to a very fine art over the past one hundred years. Pryor cloaking devices utilize two dimensional pixels presented on a two dimensional screen. The devices do a poor job of enabling an observer to “see through” the hidden object and are not adequately portable for field deployment.
More recently, three dimensional pictorial “bubbles” have been created using optics and computer software to enable users to “virtually travel” from within a virtual bubble. The user interface for these virtual bubbles are nearly always presented on a two dimensional screen, with the user navigating to different views on the screen. When presented in a three dimensional user interface, the user is on the inside of these bubbles. These bubbles are not intended for use as nor are they suitable for cloaking an object.
The present invention creates a three dimensional virtual image bubble on the surface of an actual three dimensional object. By contrast, observers are on the outside of this three dimensional bubble. This three dimensional bubble renders the object invisible to observers who can only “see through” the object and observe the object's background. The present invention can make military and police vehicles and operatives invisible against their background from nearly any viewing perspective.